Using Context-Sensitive Help in Oracle Help and Sun JavaHelp

Context-sensitive help links allow you to open a specific help topic. For example, the Help button on a window in a software product can open a specific help topic that describes the window and provides links to related topics.

You can reference topics in Oracle Help and Sun JavaHelp using the file name or an internal identifier called a topic ID or topic alias. To use file names, use a Filename marker to assign a file name to a topic. Then, you can open that specific topic with that file name. However, if your file naming changes, you need to change the link to the topic. To use an internal identifier, use a TopicAlias marker to define the identifier for each topic. The benefit of using this approach is that it allows file names to change without impacting the links from the product. The writer inserts this marker in a topic and specifies a unique value for that topic. Then, Oracle Help and Sun JavaHelp use a mapping file that defines these topic aliases.

To simplify the coding of your source documents, you can use the same marker to define both the name and the topic alias for each topic file. In Style Designer, set the Marker type option for the marker you want to use to Filename and topic alias. However, if you change the value of this marker, you need to change the application that uses this value.